SEO Best Practices
"Trust your search engine optimization project to professionals... you'll be glad you did. Trends and best practices are constantly evolving, and SEO experts stay on top of them. There are plently of 'must-do's', and just many things to avoid. An inproperly optimized website can not only prevent you from generating traffic, it can penalize you in search engines". - J. Paterson (Owner, Primary Target Media)
Search Engine Optimization - Must do's
Keyword Selection
Well researched keywords and search terms is the single biggest factor in search engine optimization. Be sure to use keyword rich content in the following areas.
- URL's and domain names
- Page Titles & Headings
- Website copy
- Meta data
- link text
- Image ALT tags
Content
These days, content is King! Ensuring your website contains well-written copy, is a critical factor in achieving high search engine rankings. Provide content to your visitors that is informative, helpful, updated and of genuine interest.
Link Building
Having other authorative websites linking to yours, shows search engines that you have valuable content to offer. The popularity of these links is one of the biggest determining factors used by search engines to rank websites in highly-competitive industries. Be sure to use anchor-text in your inbound links (use your keywords in the link text)... Avoid "Click here to visit Site X".
What to Avoid
- Do no buy text links from other websites
- Do not 'over-use' your keywords and search terms in your website's copy. Your content should sound natural.
- Keep you page load times quick. Avoid too much content and large image/media file sizes.
- Avoid duplicate content throughout your website. Try your best to ensure each page has unique content.
- Avoid the use of "doorway" pages. Doorway pages are web pages that are created for spamdexing, this is, for spamming the index of a search engine by inserting results for particular phrases with the purpose of sending visitors to a different page. They are also known as bridge pages, portal pages, jump pages, gateway pages, entry pages and by other names.